[We
reprint this article for the information of our readers. It was published in
the San Francisco Chronicle July 17, 2006, and an earlier version appeared in
The Nation magazine under the title “Mexico’s Labor Rebels.” David Bacon is the
author of “The Children of NAFTA” (University of California, 2004) and the
forthcoming “Communities Without Borders” (Cornell
University Press, 2006). He can be reached here.

Huge
national demonstrations in Mexico are now demanding a recount of the votes cast
in the presidential election, tainted by allegations
of vote fraud.

Mexico’s
wealthiest families have a lot to lose. All benefited from Mexico’s
conservative economic reforms, which the leading candidate, Felipe Calderón of the conservative National Action Party, vows to
continue. The Villareal family’s GrupoVillacero, for instance, was virtually given the huge
Sicartsa steel mill by the government in the early 1990s
for a tenth of its value, according to Mexican press reports, when government
holdings were privatized. The Larrea family’s’ Grupo Mexico got Mexico’s two great copper mines in the 1980s.

Mexican
workers, however, gained little from the privatization and want a change in
political direction. People in the United States will be affected if a recount
results in the defeat of Calderon and his reforms. If Mexican workers win
better jobs and stronger unions, they will feel less pressure to migrate north.
Higher wages will create a market for U.S.-made products, while decreasing the
incentive for moving factories south.

Privatization
and economic reforms have undermined labor rights, however. Last April, Sicartsa’s steelworkers stopped work and occupied the mill,
accusing the government of trying to take over their union. Local police made
an unsuccessful attempt to evict them on April 20, shooting and killing two. Miners
belonging to the same union in Sonora shut down Grupo
Mexico’s two copper mines, making the same protest.

Oaxaca’s
teachers have been striking for higher salaries and an end to alleged human
rights’ violations by Gov. Ulisses Ruiz. Conflict
became so bitter that on June 14, helicopters bombarded teachers occupying the
city’s central square with tear gas. Police beat scores of them. Three days
before the Oaxaca confrontation, Ruiz promised business owners he would use the
manodura, or
heavy hand, to put down protest.

Mexican
employers are discarding the social contract, in which unions had a place at
the table so long as they didn’t upset it. Increasingly, corporations such as Grupo Mexico and GrupoVillacero want no unions at all.

President
Vicente Fox, who heads the PAN, pushed hard to eviscerate the country’s labor
laws at the corporations’ behest. Mexican law prohibits strikebreaking, gives
workers the right to health care and housing, protects job security, mandates
strict work hours, and imposes severance pay for laid-off employees. Napoleon
Gomez Urrutia, head of the miners’ union, led a labor
effort that spiked Fox’s proposals.

But
labor conflict grew more heated when 65 miners died on Feb. 19 this year, in a
huge explosion in the Pasta de Conchos coalmine, owned
by Grupo Mexico. Workers told the union they were
required to weld while high concentrations of explosive methane gas filled the
shafts in the days before the accident. The gas ignited in a huge fireball.

Two
days after the explosion, Gomez Urrutia accused the
Secretary of Labor and Grupo Mexico of “industrial homicide.”
Corruption charges were made against him less than a week later, and Labor
Secretary Francisco Xavier Salazar Saenz appointed a more “cooperative” replacement
to head the union. Salazar owns two companies that supply chemicals to Grupo Mexico.

Gomez
says the country’s wealthy families “think unions are like a cancer, and should
be exterminated.”

Forty
of the dead miners were contract workers, who have no union or safety committee.
They were getting $9 a day, working 10 to 12 hours, well beyond the legal 8-hour
limit. Contract employment is a new phenomenon in Mexico. When the mines and
mills belonged to the government, workers became permanent employees after probation.
But when the Sicartsa mill was sold to the Villareals, they put half the workforce on temporary contracts
and ended their labor rights.

At
the Cananea copper mine, workers struck against Grupo Mexico in 1998 over similar demands. When they lost, 800
people were blacklisted. Displaced miners left for Arizona, 50 miles north. “I
had no alternative,” says Jorge Mendoza, now an undocumented worker in Phoenix.
“I went a year without being able to find work.”

When
Gomez Urrutia was elected union general secretary in 2001,
he began to push back hard. So when Labor Secretary Salazar tried to replace
him, workers re-elected him twice, and then struck the copper pits and the Sicartsa mill, demanding his reinstatement.

Mexicans
headed for the polls in the middle of this turmoil. Grupo
Mexico and GrupoVillacero
poured money into Calderon’s campaign, funding commercials predicting chaos if
Lopez Obrador, candidate of the Party of the
Democratic Revolution, were elected. Lopez Obrador
himself declared “we will promote respect for union democracy, and there will
be no intervention in the life of the unions.” No wonder Mexico’s most
progressive unions then called for a recount, after accusations of fraud threw
Calderon’s tiny margin into doubt.

Some, like the
miners, the telephone workers, and the Authentic Labor Front, a Mexican union
federation, have partnerships with unions on the U.S. side of the border. The
United Steel Workers, which represents U.S. copper miners, sheltered Gomez Urrutia and his family when they were forced to flee Mexico.
Relations between Mexican and U.S. mining unions go back decades. Copper miners
come from the same families on both sides of the border. In 1998, union
caravans from Arizona brought food to Cananea during
the strike.

Those
historic ties give U.S. workers a stake in Mexico’s direction. Unions here know
that if the conservative reforms continue, they will produce even greater
numbers of displaced people. Many will have little alternative but to look for
work in the north.

Meanwhile,
jobs move south. While closing 14 U.S. plants, laying
off thousands, Ford Motor Company is investing $9 billion in new Mexican plants.
“Grupo Mexico now owns the American Smelting and
Refining Company, and mines on the U.S. side, so we’re facing the same
employers,” explains Gerry Fernandez, United Steelworkers international
director. “We’re directly affected by the attack on the miners, and we’re going
to defend them.”